Until you decide to make your product available to the world, it’s just yours. You get to add to it, remove from it and change it however you want. You can do this without risk of anyone getting upset that you changed or removed their favorite feature. There is nobody to judge your product. Yet.
When you do launch, everything changes. Suddenly it’s not only yours anymore, it’s also theirs. Your users (who preferably turn into your customers) will start to use it. They develop attachments to what is there. They get frustrated with what they don’t like. They will, collectively, present you with conflicting requests to make changes.
The worst outcome is that nobody cares, and all that’s left is you and your disappointment.
Not launching, just yet, in order to fix that one bug, to tweak that one thing… it’s so tempting! You get to keep it for yourself, just for a little while longer.
The problem is that this mindset is similar to analysis paralysis: you can get stuck in it without ever launching. There is always something more you can do. Something to add, something to fix. It will never be perfect, but you can trick yourself into trying to achieve it. In reality, you’re just avoiding the potential for disappointment that could come from an unsuccessful launch.
I’ve read somewhere that if you are not at least a little ashamed of what you have launched, you have waited too long. It always sounded wise and useful, but now that I’m getting closer to launching Infinity Feed, my mind is spinning and grasping at all kinds of excuses for why I should wait just a little longer.
How I’ve been dealing with it? I’ve started talking to folks about what I’m building. I’ve hinted yesterday in the footer of my blog post that it will go live soon-ish. I’ve put up a marketing placeholder page (which read okay at the time, but now I just want to rip it off and replace it with my new one). Basically: I’ve started building momentum that should result in me launching the thing I’ve been announcing.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few more things to do before I hit the “deploy” button for real. Launching really is scary, but this post pushed me another step closer to doing it.
Curious? Want to say something? Feel free to reach out to me via Twitter or email. Besides being close to launching a smart RSS reader over at Infinity Feed, I’m a freelance Ruby software developer with a focus on back-end systems and an obsession with code quality. I’ve also decided to look at cryptocurrencies again, so expect me to mention that again in the future.
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